Filmed on Sunday, August 13 2023, I drive around the village Pontiac, IL to see what's going on.
Pontiac was laid out in 1837 by Henry Weed and brothers Lucius Young and Seth M. Young. Livingston County, which had only been created five months before, as yet had almost no functioning government. The men had agreed to donate twenty acres of land for a courthouse, another acre for a jail, and a pen for stray livestock. They had agreed to give the new county $3,000 toward erecting new buildings, to erect “a good and substantial wagon bridge" across the Vermilion River, and to build a county courthouse. None had the ready cash to support such an effort. They had simply promised to do so. Within five weeks of the founding of the town both Young brothers would be dead and Henry Weed soon drifted away and would die of pneumonia in 1842.
Jesse W. Fell would help Pontiac in many ways. The first was providing a name. He had been asked to use his influence to establish a post office in the area. In order to do this, he needed a name and selected “Pontiac” in honor of the Native American leader, who as far anyone knew had never set foot in the area.
In the early 1840s Pontiac still had only a half dozen cabins, an unfinished courthouse, and everything was so scattered among “clumps of bushes” that the town was almost invisible.
On the July 4, 1854 an exhibition train steamed into Pontiac and a few months later regular service on the railroad, soon to be known as the Chicago and Alton Railroad, began. Suddenly, Pontiac was a boom town. People flooded in and money for improvements was available. In 1856 Pontiac was officially incorporated. By 1866 the people of Livingston County could afford to spend $18,000 to construct a new stone jail in Pontiac.
Abraham Lincoln visited Pontiac in the 1840s and again in February 1855, when his train was snowbound on the nearby tracks, and he was taken by sled to spend the night at the home of Mr. John McGregor. On January 25, 1860 Lincoln was again in town when he addressed the Young Men's Literary Association.
The Illinois Department of Corrections Pontiac Correctional Center is located in Pontiac. Pontiac housed the male death row when the death penalty was still legal in Illinois.
Pontiac is home to several museums including the Route 66 Hall of Fame and Museum, the Pontiac Oakland Museum, the Livingston County War Museum, the Yost House Museum and Art Center & the International Walldog Mural and Sign Art Museum.
In the TV series Supernatural, Jimmy Novak and his family live in Pontiac.
As of the census of 2020, there were 11,150 people residing in the town, down from 11,931 in 2010.
The racial makeup of the city was 85.39% White, 10.90% Black or African American, 0.19% Native American, 0.43% Asian, 2.06% from other races, and 1.04% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 4.37% of the population.
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